UFC 257: More Metrics Reveal The Scale Of The Blockbuster PPV Event’s Success

Earlier in the week we learned that UFC 257 had become one of the promotion’s most successful pay-per-view events of all-time, garnering some 1.6 million buys worldwide, and now even more metrics have been revealed.

The new stats come courtesy of Nielson Sports, who calculated that Conor McGregor had generated a whopping 22.7 million social media engagements in the lead-in to the fight this past weekend.

Interestingly though, it was the eventual winner Dustin Poirier who emerged with more social media followers, adding 520,000 across his social media channels, compared to 439,000 for McGregor.

That will be great news for the future of Poirier’s charity ‘The Good Fight Foundation’, which also benefited from being donated $500,000 by none other than McGregor himself before the fight.

Nevertheless, Nielson noted in their press release that, “Online conversation centered on the fact that McGregor lost, and not that Poirier won,This tells us that win or lose, he remains a pivotal character that has transcended an entire sport.”

Nielson were also able to see that there’s still a great deal of interest in a potential McGregor vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov rematch, generating 12,000 discussions over a three day period.

Meanwhile, the UFC also enjoyed a social media windfall, with over 43 million engagements on social media and almost 100,000 mentions over the course of fight week.

Ross launched MMA Insight (previously FightOfTheNight.com) in 2009 as a way to channel his passion for the sport of mixed martial arts. He's since penned countless news stories and live fight reports along with dozens of feature articles as the lead writer for the site, reaching millions of fans in the process.